Especially with their new commercial iPad will take over the e-book market.

Evidenced by their commercial :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPwzKEdXLhg

If you like SF/F, try out Baen books (www.baen.com) for some inexpensive e-books. ~$15 or $20 for a whole month's output.

What is wrong with chopping down trees for books? Good books last a long, long time, I have several antiquarian titles several hundred years old and I intend to keep all my books for the next generation. It is practical and useful carbon sequestration. Do you not realise that cutting down fast growing trees and using them for furniture (the kind you keep longer than a decade) and good books is good for the environment?

I want to use e-book to lessen the paper (and thus the forest tree cutting). However, charging the same price for online version (which i still need to pay for data transfer to my e-reader) is at least ridiculous!!

That damn online version does not have paper, ink, printing cost, delivery cost and they expect me to pay the same? What kind of idiots running this scheme?

No wonder gazillions of sites give the PDF scanned of many books! And you still wonder why your sales is down...

What a jerk...

If amazon refuse to back down off the 30% fee, Macmillian have no choice but to increase the price of ebook versions to make that same margins off the papaer books.

Also by doing this, people will by less ebooks and the kindle will suffer. Hence amazon may then be willing to drop the 30% fee.

I hope all other publishers do the same too. 30% fee is crazy for "e" publishing.

Make it so that people can print off their own books at home.

Back to reality, if book publishers don't put their books online to buy then someone else will put them online.

£15 for an ebook, what a joke. Ebooks should be at most 1/3 the cost of the paperback. And you should be able to sell it on, or pass it on to a friend or two.

On one side, the publisher should accept the lower price per book because eBooks with DRM have limited resale, while hardcopies make their way into libraries and used book stores and are read by dozens of people.

On the other side, Amazon is a content disrtibuter rather than a content provider; why not publish some books? If the answer is, because the eBook market is still too small, then Amazon shoulda kept it's mouth shut for now.

"we will ... capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles"

If anyone has a monopoly here it's surely Amazon? What with being the world's biggest bookseller, and their Kindle platform. Calling Macmillan the monopoly is disingenuous at best IMO.

An e-book should be cheaper. It obviously has less cost's associated the book itself. Probably substantially so.

Same thing happened to the music industry not long ago. And the photo/film industry, etc, etc. Reality is MP3 players and digital cameras won. I'm sure in 5-10 years e-readers will be clearly better than books. In many ways they are already.

What they should be doing is figuring out how they will sell more of them online and how to either make their own ereaders/etailers or get a chunk of companies that do make ereaders.

It's a trap! really though, the point Macmillan i think is trying to make is they want to make sure that people will still buy printed books. It's an infrastructure they don't want to loose, lest they end up with the same problem newspapers & magazines are currently having.

Me, I prefer my books printed, but the question is, will enough people still like their books printed in the future? If the answer is no, then the bookstores will go, the printers will suffer, and so on down the line.

imho, they're a rock stuck in a hard place. they're gonna make somebody mad no matter what they do.

Most books have less "replay" value than other media. Reading books on a Kindle further limits this by preventing the transfer of book material in the same way you could just loan someone a book to read.

Thereore, subjecting people to pricing that will see off the kind of one-off purchase and reading on the Kindle will just encourage people to use the public libraries or seek "alternative" electronic versions of Macmillan's books that operate entirely outside of their monopolistic pricing.